Pereira O’Dell’s Robert Lambrechts on the importance of creativity

Since Robert Lambrechts started leading creative agency Pereira O’Dell over 15 years ago, he has been guided by a simple philosophy: What if advertising were invented today?

Lambrechts has never rested on repeating a “We’ve always done it this way” attitude. Now that AI innovation is shaking up the advertising world, Lambrechts says on The Current Podcast that it will keep advancing and “fundamentally change everything we do.” In the ad agency world, that could mean anything from AI coming up with campaign ideas to writing the copy for a commercial. To Lambrechts, AI will call into question what creativity really is.

“[True creativity] is the least likely outcome that someone could come to,” Lambrechts says. “If you give 100 people a problem, 98 of them are going to come up with the same solution. It’s those 2 percent that come up with something different that we term as creativity. That’s a creative solution. What AI is doing now is recapping what we’ve already known back to us.”

Elsewhere on the podcast, Lambrechts dives into how being a leader is different than being a creative and his creation of a songbook based on Snoop Dogg’s handwritten lyrics.